Mayor Suburbs must go!

His propaganda gremlins and their farcical numbers can't save him from his latest self-induced scandal.

Mayor Suburbs, aka Columbus Mayor Andy Ginther

Most of my attention and day-to-day conversations relating to The Rooster focus on statewide politics.

But over the years, though not nearly as extensive as my Statehouse contacts, I’ve developed relationships within Columbus City Hall.

Mayor Suburbs is a common topic of conversation, if you can believe that. The picture that quickly gets painted is of a guy who hates his job. It’s as if he fell into the role instead of greasing his way through the machinery of the Franklin County Democratic Party.

Previously, I thought his lack of charisma was only for residents who make less than $40,000 a year, a population he loathes and spends as much time as possible avoiding in his official capacity.

But, let those sources tell it, and Suburbs is equally uncharismatic with developers in closed-door conversations, which I would have thought would be the one area where he would have shined.

Sources have also said that Suburbs, unlike his predecessor, Michael Coleman, is not interested in building the sweeping coalitions required to enact bold infrastructure or policy ideas.

Many have questioned why he even wants the job.

It’s a fair question, and it largely explains why I’ve always suspected that Suburbs will resign before the end of his current term and take one of the many lobbying jobs available to him like Coleman did (and still does) before him.

Lobbying his former colleagues would be more lucrative, and he wouldn’t have to debase himself by shaking the hands of plebes every four years on the campaign trail. It seems like a win/win for an asocial potato of a mayor.

But according to those same sources, Suburbs swears he’s running for re-election, which is funny considering he can’t keep himself out of headlines involving his cartoonish corruption:

• Columbus settled for $195K with a former Suburbs employee who claimed the mayor forced her to work uncompensated overtime hours on his campaign.

• Lying about the severity of the City Hall data breach, which only got exposed by a good samaritan like Connor Goodwolf.

• Left an illegal voicemail to a local judge trying to influence the outcome of a lawsuit about the city moving the Greyhound Bus Terminal to the West Side of Columbus.

That’s not an exhaustive list of his entire tenure by any means. But that’s only what has become public in the past 12 months.

And frankly, this bumbling, garden-variety corruption is what Columbus voters deserve after we initially promoted Suburbs into the mayor role after he and his then-neighbor were caught taking bribes in 2015.

We also know that Mayor Suburbs enjoys spending copious amounts of time away from his office, as previously reported in October 2020 by former investigative reporter Tom Sussi, which I wrote about in March 2021:

Mayor Suburbs had played at Ohio State at least “222 times [since 2016] with most of those tee times during the working week.” At four hours a round, that’s over 35 straight days chasing a tiny white ball around a well-manicured field.

Like most scandals involving our beautiful mayor, that scandal didn’t matter in his next election.

However, it embroiled a Columbus police officer in an internal investigation for billing the city overtime hours while playing golf with the mayor while ostensibly serving as his bodyguard.

We got another example yesterday of how far Mayor Suburbs will go to avoid his office.

From Jordan Laird of The Columbus Dispatch:

Being mayor of the 14th largest U.S. city and the president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors comes with its responsibilities and perks — like visiting Italian art museums and taking the family to a private villa on a South African luxury game reserve.

Mayor Andrew J. Ginther spent more than one-fifth of the year, at least 78 days, traveling for his jobs in 2024. That includes visits to Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Morocco, South Africa, the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention, according to information provided by the mayor's spokesperson, Melanie Crabill. The city did not pay for most of the trips.

"My job as mayor is to raise our city's profile and get more direct investment from places around the country and the world and doing everything in my power to promote our city as a great place to live, do business and invest," Ginther told The Dispatch.

In December 2023, Suburbs flew to Dubai, a megacity built by slave labor, in search of “solutions” for the ongoing climate catastrophe. I’m going to guess that “globetrotting in a first-class cabin for 20 percent of your working year” wasn’t part of the climate solution smorgasbord served in Dubai. But maybe it was.

The easy way to tell that none of these trips were above board is that Team Andy Ginther (or “Team MAG” as they’re colloquially known around City Hall) didn’t publish any details or photos of his trips to Sweden, Denmark, Morocco or any other international destination.

Jennifer Fenning, a communications gremlin who toils inside City Hall, told The Dispatch that it’s “better to announce hundreds of jobs or an event coming to Columbus than announce that the mayor had a productive meeting.”

Which, sure. That might be the case if we were talking about an everyday, mundane meeting about updating the zoning or tax code. But we’re talking about international family junkets to exotic destinations like Morocco, South Africa, Italy and Sweden.

But wait! It gets better, as one of the city’s chief boosters entered the fray to defend Dear Leader:

Over the years, the mayor's in-person advocacy has led to conferences coming to Columbus that have generated hundreds of millions in dollars for the Columbus economy, said Brian Ross, president and CEO of Experience Columbus, the city's visitors bureau.

It’s worth remembering that Experience Columbus laughably claimed that over 50 million people visited Columbus in 2023. There are propaganda ministers in foreign dictatorships with more shame.

But it’s hard to fault Ross for falling on his sword.

Presenting the idea that the globetrotting of Mayor Suburbs has single-handedly generated “hundreds of millions of dollars for the Columbus economy” without an iota of substantiating evidence is part of his job description, which is only made possible by the millions of dollars that City Hall funnels into his organization to propagandize the city, facts be damned.

It doesn’t make it any less funny that a professional propagandist like Ross was the only person other than Suburbs’ subordinates willing to go on the record to defend the mayor's trip to a Moroccan botanical garden and ruined palaces, among other locales.

"It was a great opportunity for me as well to promote Columbus and encourage the governments and the businesses in both Qatar and Morocco to invest in Columbus. It's a great way for us to raise our profile," Suburbs told The Dispatch while also referencing another all-expenses-paid trip to a foreign country with a murky human rights record.

Again, you’ll notice how this bum can’t even point to a tangible benefit of the trip for anyone other than himself, his wife, or his teenage daughter.

Instead, he points to some impossible-to-prove metric like Columbus’ “profile,” as if this trip unleashed a torrent of Morrocan investment in our tepid attempt at a city.

If that were the case, we would have learned about this trip from official city organs, not Ms. Laird's gumshoe reporting.

But because we’re learning from the latter source, it’s even easier to see this for what it is: A public official skirting his desk to suck the teat of a lifestyle he couldn’t afford or obtain in any other profession other than the one he has.

And again, it’s almost hard to fault his arrogance at this point because Columbus Property Value Voters take their marching orders from the almighty Franklin County Democratic Party’s Sample Ballot.

Thankfully, all signs point to Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin challenging Mayor Suburbs in the 2027 election. If City Attorney Zach Klein joins the race, we might be on the verge of having a political system reflective of our city’s alleged “profile.”

I’m aware that electing Hardin or Klein won’t usher Columbus into a communist utopia overnight—though it’d be cool if I were wrong about that. Hardin and Klein have cut their teeth inside the same county party machinery that put Mayor Suburbs upon us.

But the mayor has had his time, as short as it was. What policy or infrastructure can this guy hang his hat on? He hates interacting with everyday citizens and dares to be incompetent in his corruption. And this is just the stuff we know about.

His time expired long ago. Hopefully, he continues earning these types of headlines all the way to his next ostensible re-election campaign. Facing other candidates who can match his fundraising would almost certainly spell doom.

And if Hardin or Klein won’t usher us into utopia, at least they can deliver the long-awaited downfall of the odious Mayor Suburbs.

All eyes are on the waxy dome of Jon Husted, who has a fossilized possum skeleton where his brain is supposed to be

Botox is a helluva drug.